Feel the force

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It’s a great relief to see Scottish Opera back on stage again, even if their season consists of only a handful of performances of a couple of operas. I hadn’t realised how sentimental I was until I found my eyes brimming with tears at being in the dress circle of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal again, shortly before the more familiar rivulets of sweat caused by the invariable sweltering heat of that place started coursing down my face. And then the excitement of the tremendous opening chords of Don Giovanni, stark but full, with the lower strings prolonged to menacing effect.

Richard Armstrong, who has returned to conduct this new production, admits in a candid interview with Andrew Clark that he is at least somewhat torn between traditional ways of taking the work, including the prolongation — or not — of that chord and its successor, which is what he heard in the 1960s under Klemperer and Colin Davis, and on the other hand the period instrument and authentic tempo approach which makes itself felt first in the opera by a curt rendering of those chords. It makes a huge difference which you do. I can’t help feeling that Armstrong’s heart is still with the great conductors he learned the score from, rather than the authenticists.

What he gives us for most of the evening is a compromise, in which lean textures, partly dictated perhaps by tight funding, go with leisurely tempi and no attempt, for instance, at rasping timpani, which this opera can really do with. Brusqueness obtrudes where a bit of lingering would do no harm: for example, at the solemn moment at which Donna Anna and Don Ottavio enter in the Act II sextet, music from the land of Die Zauberflöte, with trumpets and drums, seemed to be wilfully prosaic.